Speaker 1: This is the story of a company that is supposedly exploiting PhD graduates who are struggling to find a job. It doesn't make me happy to reveal this story. In fact, this company I used to look up to, they were aspirational as I was starting this YouTube channel, but they've been on my radar for a while and this is the story of one particularly cheeky scientist. PhD graduates are suffering. They have spent a lot of time getting their qualifications. They've missed out on opportunities. They are further along in their career than a lot of people, but unfortunately they are struggling to find a job. Many places see them as overqualified. Many places see them as too specialized. Many places just don't like touching PhD students because there's a weird kind of narrative around the fact that they may be looking for something else, something bigger and better. Wouldn't it be great if there was a company who walked you through the process of finding an academic job? They took away all of the guesswork, provided a framework. That company is The Cheeky Scientist. The Cheeky Scientist are all about learn where to start in your industry job search and they say that they help PhD graduates find industry careers. It is run by this man, Isaiah Hankel, and they have not been getting good press recently. The reason I'm talking about them today is because of this recent article published in Science and it says, Criticism builds against PhD careers firm Cheeky Scientist. This is the story of someone's postdoc coming to an end and trying to find a job and secure financial stability. And so she agreed to an intro video with the transition specialist at The Cheeky Scientist. Now the thing is, is that on the surface none of this looks bad, but when you sort of start to understand the stories and the experiences of the people, you start to realize why this is maybe not such a great thing to get involved in. She said that the intro call was just an aggressive sales pitch and this is something that is echoed time and time again and it goes back many, many years. They made her an offer saying that they could give her the Diamond Program, an online mentoring package for a little over half of what he said was the standard retail price of nearly $10,000. Now that is a load of money, but for people that are struggling to find a career outside of academia, it could seem like a good deal. He had a solution as well about the high price, a high interest loan that he could help her apply for through another company under pressure. This is all about pressure. She contacted The Cheeky Scientist within hours to request a cancellation, but now she's saddled with thousands of dollars of debt and is no closer to reclaiming her money. That is the issue. Now the thing is, is that this has been on my radar for a while. I actually really looked up to The Cheeky Scientist when I was first starting this YouTube channel because they had 15,000 subscribers and I was like, wow, if only I could get 15,000 subscribers because we all start with zero subscribers. The more I actually looked into this company, the more I was really dissatisfied and really sort of angry that they would be taking advantage of PhD students in this way. People managed to get in contact with five customers who spent approximately between $3,000 and $8,000 to join the company's diamond program. All of these stories have the same similar themes. High pressure sales, swiftly signed contracts coupled with loans that could have an annual percentage of 20% or higher, and rejected initial refund and cancellation requests regardless of whether their services are used. I've been doing a little bit of research on the sorts of experiences that customers are having with The Cheeky Scientist and it really sort of like highlights a few red flags that you should look out for with any company. The first one, which we've talked about, is high pressure sales tactics. This is a Reddit post from two years ago, but ultimately this is what the response was when they sort of like were not quite sure if they wanted to sign up for the program. Down here what I want you to look at is if you don't enroll in this program, how do you plan on getting a high level industry job when you graduate without an industry network, no business training, only 72 connections on LinkedIn, and essentially being invisible to industry employers. Ouch. An unnecessary amount of uncertainty and fear being placed in that email to try to get them to part with money. The second red flag that I think you should look for in any of these sort of situations are heavily discounted initial prices with a very tight squeeze on time and also anything that allows you to pay for the course or what they're offering with loans or a scholarship. It is a common approach in marketing, I've used it. But the thing is, is it crosses a line when it's super high pressure and there is no way of getting your money back after you've paid, there's no like cooling off period or it's very hard to get money back like a lot of these customers have experienced. The third red flag is this, if you go to Google and you type in cheeky scientist scam, the one thing that always interests me is if they have tried to own that search. Is cheeky scientist a scam? If you click on that, it takes you to their own page where they're essentially telling you they're not a scam. These are all the things people have Googled about them and this is just a search engine optimisation trick for trying to get people onto their page, trying to control the narrative. Here they talk about the five types of PhDs that shouldn't join the cheeky scientist and I think they're playing a trick on you and that's because they say the kind of PhD that thinks academia might work out for them, a kind of PhD that enjoys criticising but not executing. You believe your PhD guarantees you a job. You think that you're above the job search process. You're waiting on someone to come to hand you a job. All of those reasons I think are ways of just sort of like getting people to think, oh that's not me, so clearly I should sign up and I think that this is what this high pressure web page is trying to convince you of, is that it's not about the job search process or the lack of jobs or how hard it is in general, it's because you are this type of person and I think that is unnecessarily manipulative on a page where they're trying to control the narrative about them being a scam. That is an even deeper red flag for me. So let's have a look at more evidence of what people are saying. Two days after the scientist article, this one popped up by Derek Lowe and he says that this has been happening for a long time. A 2016 post by Chemjobber which is here, actually goes through all of the pros and cons of joining the association. They've been doing this for a very long time and it says, then Chemjobber said, bluntly put I think it looks scammy, especially when you hear tales about how the regular price for this is $10,000 but they'll hand you a deal for only $5,000. Here are some opinions from a few months ago. So if we look at, this was six months ago and it's on Reddit, you can see that there are a load of issues with this company that people are finding out after they sort of spend a lot of money through the high pressure sales tactics. Their services aren't worth $5,000. You can reach out to recruiters, invest in LinkedIn premium and watch YouTube and master the academia to industry transition. They delete and hide many of their negative reviews. They don't tell you about Visa stuff. They hire people to vouch for them on Quora and Google reviews. More opinions. Their free advice on their website and YouTube is okay. What's better than their actual career advice is how they give you confidence that you're hireable with a PhD. They just have the secret. Their free webinars could have value information but 50% of the content is aggressive, manipulative advertising for their programs and they send way too many emails and are super manipulative. Here is an example I copied and pasted of what I received today and that is a massive email which is just talking about biggest discounts. They also say that if you are shy and not confident, it might seem like an attractive network but you can do the same with a little bit of work and it's possible to find the same information on your own. This person says that what actually worked for them was getting the free advice from the internet from various sources, putting effort into their resume, cover letters and then uploading resumes on LinkedIn. There's no doubt that there's been a load of customers that incredibly disgruntled after engaging and using services from the cheeky scientist. I haven't seen the course. I'm sure there are some valuable nuggets of information in there that you could find elsewhere but maybe they're just organized in a nice sort of like structure and it just takes the thought out of that. I don't know. Let me know in the comments if you've got anything you'd like to add to this discussion but I think importantly it's all about just making you aware that these sort of companies exist that quite often they over promise and under deliver and often they use high pressure sales tactics to part you from your money. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about how academia is broken and the publishing scandal that's happening right now. I think you'll love it.